ProdCon | Rosemont | Upcoming November 18, 2026
Make Better Product Decisions with Strategic Design
Great products rarely come from execution alone. They emerge from the quality of the decisions teams make along the way. In this panel discussion, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg, Tony Bynum, and David Kazaryan explore how strategic design helps organizations frame the right problems, navigate competing priorities, connect customer needs with business outcomes, and make more confident product decisions. Hosted by Alex Schulko.
AI Builders Conference | Upcoming Oct 14, 2026
Stop Automating the Easy Things
Most AI rollouts automate easy work first, risking the experiences that build human judgment. This talk introduces Decision Architecture, a five-lens framework for deciding what AI should handle and where people still need practice. Learn how to balance short-term performance gains with long-term capability, using AI to expand expertise rather than erode it.
Industry Panel Discussion: UXCon, 2026
Inspire & Connect - Upcoming Oct 8, 2026
In this thought-provoking panel, Twisha Shah-Brandenburg explored the persistent gap between what organizations build and what customers actually need. Drawing on her experience leading design at scale, she challenged teams to move beyond surface-level insights and interrogate the assumptions driving their decisions.
She pushed the conversation toward a deeper, behavior-driven understanding of customers, emphasizing that true alignment does not come from more data, but from better interpretation of human needs in context. Through practical examples, she highlighted how teams can connect product, design, and business strategy in ways that create clarity rather than fragmentation.
The discussion ultimately reframed success away from output and toward meaningful impact. Attendees left with a stronger lens for evaluating their own work, along with tangible ways to shift from building features to solving the right problems.
Recap from Panel Discussion: Quotes from DDX Report
Workshop: Slides and framework from workshop
DDX | San Diego | September 19, 2026
Panel: The Rise of the Experience Economy
I joined leaders from Mondo Robot and Netflix to explore how digital experiences have shifted from supporting the business to becoming the business itself. We discussed how AI is changing customer expectations, why accumulated experiences now shape a brand more than its promises, and what organizations must redesign to compete on more than speed, price, or convenience.
Workshop: From Optimizing Interfaces to Designing Organizations
I led participants through a hands-on diagnostic for treating organizational friction as a design problem. They mapped how work actually moves across teams, identified where ownership, incentives, and handoffs undermine the customer experience, and reframed those breakdowns as addressable design challenges. Each participant left with a completed diagnostic, a framework to use with their team, and language for discussing organizational design debt with senior leaders.
UXPA 2026 | Las Vegas | June 23, 2026
The Invisible Work of Design
In most organizations, the work that gets celebrated is what you can ship, demo, or track on a dashboard. Yet UX’s true power often comes from invisible contributions: reframing problems so teams solve the right thing, bridging silos, stitching together incomplete systems, and shaping culture through listening and sensemaking. These acts rarely appear on roadmaps, but without them, products fail, and organizations stagnate.
This session explored how to surface, value, and scale UX's invisible layers. Through case studies from enterprises and startups, I shared how design leaders can make tacit influence visible, build trust with executives, and prevent teams from being reduced to pixel polishers. Attendees learned to identify invisible contributions that drive impact, communicate this value to stakeholders, and scale connective UX work without burning out teams.
Speaker: UXPA International 2026
Keynote + Workshop: Hosted by ADPList and Nvisia
ADPList + Nvisia Keynote | Chicago | June 10, 2026
Stop Automating the Easy Things
In this talk, I explored why designers have a critical role to play in the AI economy, not as decorators of interfaces, but as architects of human decision-making. Designers are often the only people in the room trained to understand how people interpret information, make trade-offs, respond under pressure, and navigate uncertainty. That is not a soft skill. It is one of the most strategically valuable capabilities a team can have right now.
This conversation challenged designers to stop spending their most valuable thinking on button states and start claiming the professional territory of decision architecture before someone else defines it without them.
Attendees left with a concrete framework for thinking about decision architecture, practical questions to bring back to their teams, and a clearer understanding of how design can shape the future of AI-powered products, systems, and organizations.
Virtual Speaker: Women in Tech Global Conference
Women in Tech Global Conference | May 13, 2026
Design is the Missing Operating System
As organizations race to adopt AI, redesign customer experiences, and modernize their tech stacks, many are hitting the same wall: the technology works, but the experience doesn't. The biggest failures in UX, CX, and AI transformation are not technical problems. They are design failures at the system level.
Drawing from real-world experience inside complex, digital-first organizations, this session reframed design as the connective tissue that aligns people, processes, data, and technology. Attendees learned how invisible work, handoffs, language, incentives, and organizational structures shape user experience far more than screens or features alone. It was a call to elevate design from execution to orchestration and recognize that great experiences emerge when organizations are intentionally designed.
Design Fellowship Meetup | Chicago | Design April 1, 2026
How to Strengthen Product Strategy with Design
This Delivery Fellowship session focused on how design can strengthen product strategy and move from a supporting role to a strategic advantage inside modern organizations.
In many organizations, design is still treated as a service function that executes product tickets rather than helping shape product direction. Yet the companies building the strongest products today are those where design contributes to strategy, influences decisions, and improves measurable business outcomes.
In this session, we explored how organizations can strengthen product strategy through design, identify gaps in design maturity, and understand how stronger design practices can improve product outcomes and reduce operational friction.
Chicago UX Camp | Feb 20, 2026
The Human Work of Design Maturity
We talk about design maturity as if it’s a process problem: more methods, more playbooks, more frameworks. But the truth is, most of the resistance leaders face has less to do with design skills and more to do with human dynamics: trust, alignment, and the willingness to reinvent. In this talk, I explored how to navigate the messy middle of design maturity by treating it as human work.
I shared stories from guiding large-scale transformations, where progress came not from grand blueprints but from co-creation, narrative framing, and small wins that built momentum. Attendees learned practical ways to turn resistance into influence and see their own organizations’ design maturity as less of a hurdle and more of a leadership opportunity.
Virtual Speaker: Chicago UX Camp
ADPList and Askable Event | Chicago
Panel Discussion: Are you Designing Products that Truly Matter?
In this panel, I explored the persistent gap between what organizations build and what customers actually need. Drawing on my experience leading design at scale, I challenged teams to move beyond surface-level insights and interrogate the assumptions driving their decisions.
I pushed the conversation toward a deeper, behavior-driven understanding of customers, emphasizing that true alignment does not come from more data, but from better interpretation of human needs in context. Through practical examples, I highlighted how teams can connect product, design, and business strategy in ways that create clarity rather than fragmentation.
The discussion ultimately reframed success away from output and toward meaningful impact. Attendees left with a stronger lens for evaluating their own work, along with tangible ways to shift from building features to solving the right problems.
Abbvie Summit | Mettawa
Keynote Speaker: Designing for Impact: Transforming Organizations through a human-centered design practice
Twisha took the stage to unpack how human-centered design is not just a methodology, but a strategic lever for building organizations that actually work. Through a mix of real-world examples and hard-earned insights, she showed how embedding design into the core of organizational decision-making unlocks innovation, sharpens experiences, and fuels a culture where creativity and collaboration are not aspirational, but operational.
She brought to life how design moves beyond craft to become a catalyst for meaningful change. By aligning what organizations want to achieve with what people actually need, she demonstrated how design thinking cuts through complexity, accelerates outcomes, and creates coherence across teams, channels, and systems.
Instead of prescribing outcomes, she reframed what’s possible. The session challenged conventional approaches to problem-solving and invited leaders to rethink how their organizations operate at the intersection of strategy, systems, and human need. Attendees left with a sharper lens for identifying opportunities, asking better questions, and applying human-centered design in practical, transformative ways.
UXPA International | San Diego
Speaker: Radical Empathy: A path to justice and equity in product design
In this session, I explored how bias shows up in the products and systems we design, often reinforcing inequities for underrepresented groups. Through real-world examples, I highlighted how both product decisions and design systems can unintentionally exclude.
I introduced radical empathy as a starting point, challenging teams to examine their own identities, assumptions, and blind spots. Drawing from my work with cross-functional teams, I shared a simple framework for unpacking bias and widening the lens on both problem and solution.
The session focused on practical application, offering a toolkit and clear strategies to help teams build more inclusive products. Attendees left with actionable ways to embed equity into their process and move beyond intention toward meaningful change.